Comment

The Argos approach

It's an increasingly rum world outside the playpen. Single women are to be given the go-ahead to have in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment on the NHS when the government updates fertility legislation this summer. The 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act requires clinics to consider the welfare of babies born through IVF and stresses the importance of a father. On Wednesday the health minister Caroline Flint said the government may jettison the "need for a father" clause.

Instead it is prepared to fork out £3,000 of taxpayers' money for a free IVF cycle for single under-35s. This subsidises the social "crime" that was recently treated as the sole source of society's degeneration into a feckless, benefits-dependent, Asbo-headed underclass: namely single parenthood.

Remember Nicki Lane? Aged 20, in 1999, she reigned briefly as Miss Great Britain, until, to quote a tabloid, she was "stripped of her title over secret sin" - the "sin" being her six-year-old son, conceived when she was only 14. Now, as a bonus prize along with the tiara, if she was so inclined and still single, she could book herself an IVF cycle. What kind of madness is this?

Nobody wants the return of the political hounding of single parents, nor the resurrection of urban myths about teenage mothers and council housing. Still, when the government suggests that to deny single women IVF is a breach of human-rights laws, an obvious question comes to mind: what about the rights of the children?

It's a paradox that as a flood of research shows the importance of an engaged father in a child's life, a new consensus is in the making. It says that as an ideal - not just as a product of human error or ignorance or a broken relationship - one parent is enough.

This is the free market talking. It's the Argos-catalogue approach to family life in which wanting is sufficient justification for having. Placing one's own needs before someone else's - a corruption of the mutuality on which society depends - is thus seen as "good" because it is an exercise in consumer choice.

Children of lone-parent families are likely (a prediction, not a certainty) to do less well in education, employment and relationships. However, this is as much to do with lack of money and poor job prospects. Women who opt for IVF will have to have cash; one cycle of IVF is rarely enough. Since they will presumably not be a drain on the public purse, politicians appear indifferent to the consequences. However, even if women disregard children's rights, on health grounds they ought to be concerned.

Why is the government promoting a fertility industry that is highly invasive, whose long-term effects are unknown and whose success rate is so appallingly low, when any other company with a similar record of failure would have gone out of business?

A woman under 35 has less than a 30% chance of conceiving with IVF; for a woman over 40 the rate drops to 10%. Or, to put it another way, 90% will pump themselves full of hormones several times over to achieve nothing but penury and a hugely inflated bank balance for the so-called fertility "experts".

In endorsing IVF for single women, the government is taking part in a dangerous propaganda exercise, "normalising" a procedure that ought to be a measure of the very last resort, if not discounted altogether. Instead, in the present climate, intercourse as a means of conception among overstressed thirtysomethings increasingly appears passe as IVF is promoted, wrongly, as a viable route to late parenthood.

One argument says: you can't stop a woman having a baby naturally, so why ration IVF? The response is that a consensus in society works in mysterious ways to put a brake on some activities and encourage others - for better or for worse. This measure takes the brake off. Pity the children who stand in the way.